Apologies if this has been answered before but what mass of olivine is required per ton of CO2 uptake? Mining an moving bulk material around is not cost free. Is the olivine to CO2 uptake ratio 1/10th that of coal to CO2 release ratio; 1/10000th of that; some other fraction?
Sent from my iPad On Jan 26, 2015, at 11:47 AM, Oliver Tickell <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Nice idea! As Olaf has written (doubtless he can share the paper with us) there are areas of the North Sea with very strong tidal currents that would very effectively tumble any olivine gravel / sand placed on the seabed, so all you have to do is dump the stuff off ships into suitable areas of sea. Of course you would have to perform experiments tracking the fate of the gravel / sand once put there in order to justify any claims re scale and rates of carbon sequestration - and that's the difficult bit! Oliver. On 26/01/2015 10:49, Andrew Lockley wrote: As regards transport: costings must follow strategy. To consider the civil engineering : I suggest that spreading on beaches is unnecessary and logistically difficult. Far better to dump the material in shallow coastal waters with active material transport - especially where erosion threatens settlements, such as around much of the UK coast. It will be on the beach soon enough! Open water deposition can be done with bulk carriers (either split hull or conveyor / auger fed) . Plenty of ships used for transport of minerals, grain, bulk powders, etc are available. A better spread will be less harmful to marine life, so slower deposition rates will be safer. This suggests conveyor or auger carriers . For transport from the mine, using open river flows (if that was what was implied) seems irrational. Rivers would quickly silt, and local ecosystem effects would be disastrous. In larger rivers, barges would be viable, but most mines will not be near major rivers. Rail to the coast also avoids the need to change transport mode. Again, bulk dry materials are routinely transported by rail, and no innovation is required. Ports also are commonly fed by rail, so only track to the mine head from the nearest railway need be newly laid. In Europe, one is rarely more than a few dozen miles from a railway. A large mine will function for decades, meaning track civils costs are trivial. I'm happy to help publish on this. I think a paper that goes down to site specifics would be very useful. Engineering publications give clarity and precision to methods - IKEA flat-pack instructions for fixing the climate. A Where do you get that number of $100 per ton of CO2 captured from? You come close to that number if you use that silly CCS, capture CO2 from the chimneys of coal-fired power plants, clean it with expensive and poisonous chemicals and then compress it to a few hundred bars and pump it in the subsoil. If you use enhanced weathering of olivine you have $4 for the mining of bulk rock in large open-pit mines $2 for milling it to 100 micron ?? for transport and spreading (but ?? is certainly not $94); strategically selecting new mine sites will help to reduce costs of transport. So when you do some economic calculations, use realistic figures, Olaf Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf) From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] On Behalf Of Mike MacCracken Sent: zondag 25 januari 2015 17:27 To: Greg Rau; Geoengineering Subject: Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | The Energy Collective Let me expand my quick description to be 90% cut in human-induced emissions (on top of all the natural sinks), so natural CDR does not count. And on the proposed removal industry, for $100 per ton of CO2, an awful lot could be done to replace fossil fuels with other sources of energy, or even better efficiency, a huge amount of which could be done for much less, if we’d try. So, nice that there is a CO2 removal approach as a backstop to what the cost of changing energy would be—basically, you are suggesting it should cost less than $100 per ton of CO2 to address the problem. With the new paper in Nature (lead author is a former intern that worked with me at the Climate Institute) that the social cost of CO2 is more than twice the cost of, then it makes huge economic sense to be addressing the problem. So, indeed, let’s get on with it—research plus actually dealing with the issue. Mike On 1/24/15, 1:40 PM, "Greg Rau" <[email protected]<http://[email protected]>> wrote: Mike, If it takes "a 90% cut in CO2 to stop the rise in atmospheric concentration", we are already more than half way there thanks to natural CDR. About 55% of our CO2 emissions are mercifully removed from air via biotic and abiotic processes. So just 35% to go? As for "CDR replacing the fossil fuel industry", here's one way to do that: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/25/10095.full , but low fossil energy prices (or lack of sufficient C emissions surcharge) are unlikely to make this happen. Certainly agree that we need all hands and ideas on deck in order to stabilize air CO2. But for reasons that continue to baffle me, that is not happening at the policy, decision making, and R&D levels it needs to. Greg ________________________________ From: Mike MacCracken <[email protected]<http://[email protected]>> To: Geoengineering <[email protected]<http://[email protected]>> Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2015 9:06 AM Subject: Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | The Energy Collective Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | The Energy Collective In terms of an overall strategy, it takes of order a 90% cut in CO2 emissions to stop the rise in the atmospheric concentration, and that has to happen to ultimately stabilize the climate (and it would be better to have the CO2 concentration headed down so we don’t get to the equilibrium warming for the peak concentration we reach (recalling we will be losing sulfate cooling). Thus, to really stop the warming, CDR in its many forms has to be at least as large as 90% of CO2 emissions (from fossil fuels and biospheric losses). That is a lot of carbon to be taking out of the system by putting olivine into the ocean, biochar, etc. at current global emissions levels (that are still growing). The greater the mitigation (reduction in fossil fuel emissions), the more effective CDR can be—what would really be nice is CDR replacing the fossil fuel industry so ultimately it is as large. I’d suggest this is why it is really important to always be mentioning the importance of all the other ways, in addition to CDR, to be cutting emissions—that is really critical. Mike On 1/24/15, 10:19 AM, "Stephen Salter" <[email protected]<http://[email protected]>> wrote: Hi All Paragraph 2 mentions 'carbon negative' nuclear energy. The carbon emissions from a complete, working nuclear power station are mainly people driving to work. But digging, crushing and processing uranium ore needs energy and releases carbon in inverse proportion to the ore grade. There were some amazingly high grade ores, some once even at the critical point for reaction, but these have been used. Analysis by van Leeuwen concludes that the carbon advantage of present nuclear technology over gas is about three but that the break-even point comes when the ore grade drops to around 100 ppm. This could happen within the life of plant planned now. As we do not know how to do waste disposal we cannot estimate its carbon emissions. But just because we cannot calculate them does not mean that they are zero. Stephen Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design. School of Engineering. University of Edinburgh. Mayfield Road. Edinburgh EH9 3JL. Scotland [email protected]<http://[email protected]> Tel +44 (0)131 650 5704<tel:%2B44%20%280%29131%20650%205704> Cell 07795 203 195 WWW.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs<http://WWW.see.ed.ac.uk/%7Eshs> <http://WWW.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs<http://WWW.see.ed.ac.uk/%7Eshs>> YouTube Jamie Taylor Power for Change On 24/01/2015 14:56, Andrew Lockley wrote: Poster's note : none of this explains why there's any need for integration. Chucking olivine in the sea seems easier and cheaper than all. http://theenergycollective.com/noahdeich/2183871/3-ways-carbon-removal-can-help-unlock-promise-all-above-energy-strategy 3 Ways Carbon Removal can Help Unlock the Promise of an All-of-the-Above Energy Strategy January 24, 2015 “We can’t have an energy strategy for the last century that traps us in the past. We need an energy strategy for the future – an all-of-the-above strategy for the 21st century that develops every source of American-made energy.”– President Barack Obama, March 15, 2012 An all-of-the-above energy strategy holds great potential to make our energy system more secure, inexpensive, and environmentally-friendly. Today’s approach to all-of-the-above, however, is missing a key piece: carbon dioxide removal (“CDR”). Here’s three reasons why CDR is critical for the success of an all-of-the-above energy strategy: 1. CDR helps unite renewable energy and fossil fuel proponents to advance carbon capture and storage (“CCS”) projects. Many renewable energy advocates view CCS as an expensive excuse to enable business-as-usual fossil fuel emissions. But biomass energy with CCS (bio-CCS) projects are essentially “renewable CCS” (previously viewed as an oxymoron), and could be critical for drawing down atmospheric carbon levels in the future. As a result, fossil CCS projects could provide a pathway to “renewable CCS” projects in the future. Because of the similarities in the carbon capture technology for fossil and bioenergy power plants, installing capture technology on fossil power plants today could help reduce technology and regulatory risk for bio-CCS projects in the future. What’s more, bio-CCS projects can share the infrastructure for transporting and storing CO2 with fossil CCS installations. Creating such a pathway to bio-CCS should be feasible through regulations that increase carbon prices and/or biomass co-firing mandates slowly over time, and could help unite renewable energy and CCS proponents to develop policies that enable the development of cost-effective CCS technology. 2. CDR bolsters the environmental case for nuclear power by enabling it to be carbon “negative”: Many environmental advocates say that low-carbon benefits of nuclear power are outweighed by the other environmental and safety concerns of nuclear projects. The development of advanced nuclear projects paired with direct air capture (“DAC”) devices, however, could tip the scales in nuclear’s favor. DAC systems that utilize the heat produced from nuclear power plants can benefit from this “free” source of energy to potentially sequester CO2 directly from the atmosphere cost-effectively. The ability for nuclear + DAC to provide competitively-priced, carbon-negative energy could help convince nuclear power’s skeptics to support further investigation into developing safe and environmentally-friendly advanced nuclear systems. 3. CDR helps enable a cost-effective transition to a decarbonized economy: Today, environmental advocates claim that prolonged use of fossil fuels is mutually exclusive with preventing climate change, and fossil fuel advocates bash renewables as not ready for “prime time” — i.e. unable to deliver the economic/development benefits of inexpensive fossil energy. To resolve this logjam, indirect methods of decarbonization — such as a portfolio of low-cost CDR solutions — could enable fossil companies both to meet steep emission reduction targets and provide low-cost fossil energy until direct decarbonization through renewable energy systems become more cost-competitive (especially in difficult to decarbonize areas such as long-haul trucking and aviation). Of course, discussion about the potential for CDR to enable an all-of-the-above energy strategy is moot unless we invest in developing a portfolio of CDR approaches. But if we do make this investment in CDR, an all-of-the-above energy strategy that delivers a diversified, low-cost, and low-carbon energy system stands a greater chance of becoming a reality. Noah Deich Noah Deich is a professional in the carbon removal field with six years of clean energy and sustainability consulting experience. Noah currently works part-time as a consultant for the Virgin Earth Challenge, is pursuing his MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and writes a blog dedicated to carbon removal (carbonremoval.wordpress.com<http://carbonremoval.wordpress.com> <http://carbonremoval.wordpress.com <http://carbonremoval.wordpress.com/> > ) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]<http://[email protected]>. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]<http://[email protected]>. 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